Content publishers produce primary content for consumption by client devices. The primary content may include videos, web pages, services, images, audio, text, applications, games, and/or other digital assets. Network enabled client devices may access the primary content via the Internet and/or other digital networks.
Since the primary content often travels over several network hops to arrive at a client device, the user experience may hinge on how fast the primary content can be delivered to the client device. If the primary content takes too much time to arrive at the client device, especially with respect to an initial presentation of the primary content, the client device may switch to alternate content, fail to complete a transaction, or simply abort the request.
Content publishers may rely on one or more content delivery networks (“CDNs”) for the delivery of their primary content. A CDN may be a distributed platform that caches and serves the same content to client devices at different network locations or geographic regions from points-of-presence (“PoPs”) closest to those network locations or geographic regions. In other words, the CDN provides a redundant and scalable architecture that can accommodate a large volume of content requests, and can deliver the requested content over fewer network hops than if the content was hosted and served from a single location.
Despite the efficiency with which a CDN may deliver primary content of a content publisher to a client device, the presentation of that primary content may be delayed because the content publisher integrates secondary content as part of the primary content, and the secondary content may be delivered from outside the CDN by independent third-party content providers. Content publishers may integrate secondary content (e.g., advertisements) to monetize their primary content, and/or provide proprietary third-party content (e.g., social media feeds, news feeds, third-party services, etc.) to enhance their primary content.
The delivery of the secondary content may be delayed relative to the primary content that is delivered by the CDN, because of the smaller delivery footprint and fewer resources of the third-party content provider relative to the CDN, and/or because of the targeted selection of the secondary content. For instance, secondary party content, such as advertisements, may be targeted on an individual user or client device basis. The targeted secondary content or advertisements may be selected based on user and/or session information (e.g., prior search history, age, location, income, etc.) that the third-party content provider obtains and analyzes before providing the secondary content or advertisements. There may be delay associated with obtaining the user and/or session information. There may be further delay associated with a real-time bidding process used for the secondary content selection. The real-time bidding process may involve different advertisers bidding against one another to have their advertisements (e.g., secondary content) delivered to users that meet their advertisement demographic or criteria. The bidding may occur in real-time in response to the third-party content provider receiving a request for secondary content. The secondary content of the highest bidder may then be selected and sent from the third-party content provider to the client device. These and other delays may cause the targeted secondary content to arrive at a client device well after (e.g., hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds) the primary content, that integrates the secondary content, is delivered to the client device by the CDN.
In some cases, the client device may be unable to render a presentation until the client device receives all content for that presentation. Therefore, if an initial presentation includes both primary content and secondary content, the initial presentation may be contingent on the last arriving content, thereby nullifying the performance of the CDN and degrading the user experience.
In other cases, the client device may be able to render the initial presentation based on the CDN delivered primary content without the later arriving secondary content. In these cases, the initial presentation appears incomplete, and the user experience may be interrupted as the later arriving secondary content is subsequently rendered after the initial presentation of the primary content. For instance, the addition of the secondary content after the initial presentation may cause objects within the initial presentation to shift, move, or otherwise change.